An improvement on 1 in some ways and a step back in others. The story is definitely different, with multiple factions and characters getting screen and play time. It fluctuates between kind of lame and sort of interesting.

The game largely ditches the ERS system where you fly through on screen gates to your destination or objectives, or to intercept enemies. I can think of one mandatory ERS section in the entire game, and a few I initiated voluntarily so I could figure out where to go to land on a dang runway.

The myriad military inaccuracies bug me in the game, but I can look past them. Overall the HAWX games aim to be more realistic than their AC rivals, and in some ways it makes for a trickier experience (e.g. you don't have a missile type that hits land and air targets). I think it benefits from this sort of detail.

The game still features the standout "assistance off" mode for dog fighting, which as long as you enable the "expert" control setting for the assistance off mode still delivers the finest air combat console experience.

What bugged me about 2, however, is that it falls prey to the Ace Combat school of AI programming where to make it as challenging as possible, enemy planes will maneuver a few hundred feet away from you at all times and at super low speeds, basically flying in loops and circles/orbiting around you, making it close to impossible to achieve a missile lock or line up a gun salvo. It bugs me because the main way to untangle yourself from these dog fighting webs is to do exactly what I DON'T want to do--turn assistance back on, dogfight from your conventional camera perspective, and enjoy a much easier way of lining up gun kills since your missiles either won't lock or won't track people 450m from your plane and doing endless fly-bys of your fuselage.

In summary, the moments the game gives you which are best suited to just switching assistance off and enjoying the unencumbered fighter maneuverability without needing to worry about ground targets are the same moments where it seems designed to discourage you from doing just that. Kind of disappointing.

A note about the campaign: I booted this game up thinking I had either not beaten it or not played it at all. Apparently I had beaten the entire game before, as evidenced by the missions all being available for replay and the achievements unlocked for having beaten them, yet at no point during the entire campaign did I ever do or see anything that rang as familiar to me. That is a somewhat damning critique of the campaign which I have certainly played more recently than games like God of War or Star Wars: Clone Wars, which I played many years hence and remembered much more vividly than this--which is to say, not at all.

Also, this game is definitely a product of its time. It boasts what in 2010 would have been an obligatory AC-130 mission, which I'm okay with, but it also boasts a handful of UAV missions which offer little in the way of compelling gameplay and feel like drawn out, mildly interactive cutscenes used to advance the story but not really serve a good gameplay purpose. They add some value, but they take up too much of the game and slow down the pace too much. I came here to pull Gs, not watch trucks through a scope and follow them around until someone tells me to click the A button.

Another thing I forgot to mention. The graphics generally look good. However, like most other flight games, the ground objects and textures look markedly worse than the rest of the game. Like, a generation behind graphically.

I get why, and I don’t hold that against the game. What I do hold against it is that it relies on in-engine cutscenes a lot, and a lot of those prominently feature these awful looking assets. Like, a ridiculous amount. I couldn’t believe they kept cutting to this awful looking material. I don’t know why they didn’t either structure the story or at least the cutscenes around the horrible ground textures more.

I liked this game well enough, but it's not earth shatteringly good. It's good because the production values are pretty solid ignoring the aforementioned cutscenes of ground stuff, and the air combat, when at its best, is the best in the business. An easy recommend to anyone who digs air combat games, but otherwise it's a bit of a reach.